AOTS Journal 2018 SPRING No.12 (ENGLISH)

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5No. 12 SPRING 2018Report on AOTS International Symposium ‘Toward Work Style Reforms: Revised Labor Laws in France and the Difference of Labor-Management Relations between Japan and FranceAOTS, with a consignment of the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, has been organizing training for of-cials from foreign employer organizations and corporate personnel experts on such topics as Japanese labor-management practices and human resource management. As a part of the training this year, the above titled symposium was held by AOTS in Tokyo on October 31, 2017.The extensive revision of French labor codes in 2016 and 2017 has attracted global attention. AOTS invited Professor Jean-Emmanuel Ray, the leading expert on the French labor codes at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, to speak on the background and objectives of the labor code revisions as well as his view on their future development. The symposium attracted an audience beyond the capacity of the venue and ended in a great success. Keynote Lecture by Professor Ray - A SummaryFrench labor code reform started in 1982, and has nally reached its goal. Previous regulations used to prescribe the minimum labor conditions, allowing to add only favorable conditions for the labor side through collective agreement by industrial sector*; however, after the Auroux law of 1982, it has become possible to congure labor conditions through agreement by enterprise in addition to conventional laws and collective agreement by industry, thus it has been possible to dene different working conditions by enterprise within the same trade. Further, the revision in 2004 has permitted exemption of some labor conditions in any collective agreement by trade when agree-ment within an enterprise permits. Although this option was not practiced widely, it showed, at least, a path to dene labor conditions by agreement within the enterprise. The revision in 2017, however, made it principle to prioritize the agreement within an enterprise over a collective agreement by trade, nally. Any enterprise now is permitted to determine various labor conditions such as wages, job assign-ment or working hours by agreement with its labor force in a more exible manner than before in order to preserve its competitiveness while costs related to dismissal have been lowered. It is expected that France will achieve a higher employment rate and more employ-ment opportunities for younger workers as requested by the EU. These reforms of labor law consider the emergence of technical innovations in a new age and changing the mode of labor in accor-dance with them. The Internet has made it possible for those who engage in intellectual work to execute work at various times and using methods free from the xed concept of working as dened in the labor law to ‘work in a xed time at the xed working place.’ An enter-prise has become unable to manage labor hours as well as recess time; adoption of ‘de facto working hours’ simply exposed a limitation of the labor laws. Challenges for the labor laws in the future include how to ensure the ‘un-connected right’ of labor to keep away from the Internet as it is getting harder for intellectual workers to distinguish work and private hours and how to cope with emerging business models of information technology. *Norms dened by labor-management consultation for respective working conditions by sector such as metal, automobile, chemistry, banking and others.Panel DiscussionFollowing the keynote speech, a panel discussion was held where panelists answered pre-submitted questions from the oor. The following is a highlight of the topics that day.•Will the reforms of labor laws continue as they are?•Employment and labor-management relations of platform businesses represented by Uber.•Regulation of dismissals at French subsidiaries of global businesses•The difference of views toward working by generation, type of business or type of jobs.•Different way of working between Japanese and French workersFor all of those topics, we were able to get various views and opinions from the panelists in spite of the short time available.From the left: Dr. Jean-Emmanuel Ray, Professor of Labor Law at Paris 1 – Sorbonne/ Mr. Ryo Hosokawa, Researcher, The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training/ Dr. Masahiro Suzuki, Emeritus Professor, Waseda University/ Mr. Davy Le Doussal, Counsel, TMI Associates